Green Options

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This week, world leaders of the G8 Club and their colleagues from the regional blocs of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are gathered in Hokkaido, Japan for yet another round of talks in which climate change will ultimately feature.

Apart from parading their own theoretic short and long term goals and how best to approach this growing problem while clouding their own best national interests, making concessions for climate change may prove harder than committing to curb global carbon pollution.

As the main players at the Hokkaido summit, were the G8 Club, and China, Brazil and India, to pose and think about climate change issues as possible recipe for wars, the plight of the millions of victims of the conflict in Darfur, Sudan would connect with their jostling for the best breathing space.

For those who fervently follow global warming to the secret labyrinths of the White House, we all know what the professional spinners did with that email attachment from the Environmental Protection Agency about how greenhouse gasses were polluting the environment and should be checked.

Instead of acting upon it or even printing copies to president George Bush and his handlers, they tossed it in a cyber trash bin called Spam folder as if that was the only green thing to do.

Many months after Scott McClellan quit spinning for Dubya, climate watchers are crying foul that he never ever touched the seemingly hot subject in his recently released book, What Happened. But in his famous spins, he had blamed human activity - you and me - as responsible for global warming on more than one occasion.

Spin can be clever tomfoolery sometimes but the White House stance on global warming is well known and George W. Bush has never disappointed with his public statements that smack verily of official ignorance or pretense on the subject as an inconvenient truth.

Enjoying a favorite beer shouldn’t get anyone panicky about his ecological footprint, and serious beer manufacturers who are also eco-savvy are taking stock of the impact your beer may be making on the environment.

And for those whose throats never run dry too often, that should give you the more reason to enjoy a drink at dinner or drop by your local joint and order a round or two, to celebrate a triumph for the environment - seeing more and more corporates even in the beer manufacturing industry adopt an agenda to reduce their carbon footprint.

So when East African Breweries or EABL, manufacturers of the world famous Tusker beer, and recently, Senator beer, announced the formation of a fully fledged Green Team to score eco-points for their newly launched Green Goals project, it marked a significant milestone.

Scientists will tell you that men have a lot to learn from the animal world in as far as the art of sex is concerned.
This fact was reinforced last week with the announcement that ecologists at the University of California, Davis had isolated scent-emitting enzymes that could be manipulated to prevent sexual activity between males and females of the Japanese beetle as a way of checking their population.

Essentially, this means that scent has been confirmed to play a major social-environmental stimuli role for sexual activity in insects and other animals, like the mammals and even human beings.

The importance of smell in relation to sex has been studied for centuries. Books like The Scent of Eros: Mysteries of Odor in Human Sexuality by James V. Kohl and Robert T. Francoeur and The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour by David Michael Stoddart offer great insights into human pheromones, the sense of smell, and human sexual behavior.

Cannibalism has never been a widely accepted art form but when, in 2003, Zhu Yu, a Chinese man, ate a still born baby and filmed himself at it, he called it an art and found nothing wrong with his act. The British Channel 4 TV actually broadcast the Beijing Swings footage and earned a censure from the Independent Television Commission for showing a “lack of respect for human dignity” and having “exceeded the boundaries of acceptability.”

“The broadcast of such images raises serious questions, not only about the morality of the artists in using dead babies in pursuit of their artistic expression, but of the broadcasters’ responsibility not to infringe their dignity,” ITC said.

Cannibalism can be more than art as has been documented among the Yanomami, Coaque and Anasazi Indians. Beth Conklin, an American anthropologist concluded in 2001 that cannibalism had a human face after spending time with the Wari’ Indians in the Amazon.

On Friday, 27 June 2008, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, also known as Comrade by his camaraderie of marauding thugs roaming about the breadth of Zimbabwe, will preside over his own election, uh again, as president of Zimbabwe.

Declared a sham, even a mock of an election, by the common voice of the international community and his neighbors in southern Africa alike, that has not stopped Mugabe’s men, or freedom fighters as he calls them, from baying for the blood of whomever Zimbabwean cannot correctly pronounce “Zanu-PF”, his machine to run roughshod over his hapless countrymen.

His perennial rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, having backed out of the presidential run-off, the 84 year old despot kicked a soccer ball high up into the air at a sports stadium this week as a show of virility to those who still doubt his undying resolve to cling on to power no matter what - and “only God can remove me from the presidency of Zimbabwe”.

Now that formally leaves Mugabe only at the mercy of zealous cartoonists who love to caricature him as a gorilla. And for good reasons. If looks alone was the reason for this, one could say they have been overdoing themselves but the man’s intimidating appearance, extreme strength, and chest-beating displays mimic the hairy animal to a great detail, and he loves it that way.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer is going green. At least in its first ecologically sustainable paper manufacturing venture. A carton paper manufacturer is making good its concerted efforts in environmental sustainability in the desert kingdom to recycle paper and raise consumer awareness about eco issues.

In a joint effort, the country’s paper manufacturer, Middle East Paper Company (MEPCO) and Tetra Pak Arabia will, exchange expertise and experiences in the recycling field and MEPCO’s role will be to collect, sort and do the actual recycling work. Beverage carton recycling will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from landfill sites.

The partnership will address the issue of recycling thousands of cartons that get discarded by households and other establishments across Saudi Arabia on a daily basis, the first of its kind in the Middle East region.

The collaborators hope that apart from making a mark on the environment, they will be opening the recycled products, largely post consumer food and beverage cartons, to a wider international market, and follows successful trials conducted to demonstrate the recycling ability of Tetra Pak cartons by MEPCO.

They go by the boisterous acronym MEND, or the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, and they are lethal. As political students of Niccolò Machiavelli, they have crafted Machiavellian tactics to a fault, and boast about shutting oil pipelines in their motherland to get the ears of their sullen government and the rest of the capitalist world which is driven by its lust for oil.

But they don’t just boast, they actually engage in hostage taking and abduction of foreign oil workers working in Nigeria’s oil rich but socio-economically poor Delta region for ransom (they call it pollution reparation); sometimes killing them and even bombing oil pipelines for effect.

MEND said in an email circulated to news media in January 2006: “It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it…. Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.”

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) published a report in 2006 that documented the plunder of natural resources by human activity and warned that the globe itself could be outstripped in its capacity to support life, rendering the earth extinct in under 50 years.

Based on scientific data collected from across the globe, it revealed that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by human activity in just over the past three decades, because of, among others, increased emissions of green house gases into the ecosystem.

Unless consumption of natural resources was cut and the destruction of vital ecosystems was stopped, human life and that of thousands of other animals and plants would not be sustainable hence the suggestion that the earth itself could be extinct by 2050. In short, the demise of biodiversity will be the death of life on earth, as we know it.

“Khotso, pula, nala.”
“Peace, rain, prosperity.”
When there is peace and rain people live happier because they will not be fighting; they will plough their fields and will have food. - African proverb.

Listening to Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni at any forum has never been boring. He can make his audiences jeer and laugh at the same time but not without drama at times. Museveni is both loved and hated by many because of his straight talking. But that is not to say he does so all the time.

One such time was at a recent Commonwealth leaders meeting in London where he happily laughed off the current global food crisis.

What seems good riddance for his small landlocked nation in east Africa has been boggling minds elsewhere and governments from Argentina to Senegal, from Egypt to South Africa, have grappled with riots of sorts over high prices of food. In Haiti, it cost the political life of a prime minister who had to vacate office for failing to soften the hunger pangs of his people.